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Wednesday, August 09, 2006

Summer in the City - Summertime Santas

Last Wednesday I read from my new novel at the Astor Place Barnes & Noble store. I used to live in that neighborhood and, as I was too broke most of the time to afford movies or meals out or nearly any other disportment, I would kill countless hours by mooching their magazines and standing in their aisles, reading and reshelving books I couldn’t afford to buy. So when I took to the lectern this week, angled the business end of the microphone my way, and started speaking, I experienced a frisson of something other than stage fright. It was a kind of stage exhilaration. I felt like a Frank Capra protagonist coming full circle in some important way. In fact, returning to New York City and reading at the very same bookstore from which I had filched so much pleasure seemed like I was being afforded a chance to right wrongs.

But microphones make me giddy and provoke some Tourettic center in my brain that can precipitate outbursts of obscenity or non sequitur. As I started reading from the prologue — one of the sadder parts of the novel — I suffered a stutter that elongated into a pause that became an awkward full stop, and instead of backtracking on the page, I was overwhelmed with the desire to utter something that would be unprintable on this site. And to confess my magazine sponging. And to make a public service message: “If you are going to freeload magazines and squat in the café without buying anything for hours on end, please think of the clerks and put your [expletive deleted] magazines back where you got them. Take it from me” — here insert expression of much discomfort of gnashing of teeth — “from someone who has made those mistakes.”

I also wanted to pump my fist and cry out, “San Dimas High School football rules!” but I managed to hold it back.

After a few moments I broke my caesura and finished the reading without incident. During the Q and A and the signing, when I was relaxed enough to really apprehend the crowd, I noticed how full of personal history it was. There were several of my former students from the University of Georgia, including one who now works in the marketing department at my publisher, one who teaches at a New York City school, one who works in the art industry and one who writes for a major magazine. I was touched that they came, but I was also proud of them and wanted to find an uncorny way of telling them so. I felt a kinship with them that I hadn’t felt in the classroom. Back then, there had been something germinal about them. Now we were part of the same thing — the glory and travail of life in New York City.

There was also a woman with whom I went to prep school.

And friends of friends. An ex-colleague. The son of a favorite professor of mine.

A punk-rock Asian woman I remembered from the reading of my first novel who thrust a copy of that book at me and said candidly, “I want you to sign the first book because I am not so sure that your second one is any good.”

This whole thing produced a powerful wave of nostalgia and made me realize, again, how in New York City history is alive in a way that it isn’t in a lot of places. It also distracted me and made me forget that I had brought treats for everyone. I had gotten word just hours before the reading that the Barnes & Noble had no air conditioning in the reading area. They were moving me to the café, which had some window units working, but it might still be uncomfortable. So I had packed up a cooler full of bottles of water and Popsicles and lugged it up and down the countless stairs of the G and the L train stations, and the downtown 6, all the way to Astor Place, with the intention of handing them out to suffering audience members.

But it never happened. I had been mesmerized by the power of the microphone and then beguiled by the figures from my past swarming around my table like benevolent apparitions out of Dickens, and didn’t remember the cooler until after the crowd had dissipated. But there was a consolation. I and a group of friends — some I had known for years, some I had just met — rolled the cooler out onto Lafayette Street and handed out refreshing chilled water and deliquescing Popsicles like a band of summertime Santas.

It was a New York spectacle — my old friend from Ohio hocking free Popsicles with the theatricality of a Yankee Stadium peanut vendor; a fellow writer assuring a profoundly sweaty homeless guy swathed head-to-toe in flannel that it was O.K. to take as many waters as he wanted. And I think we made the poor Greenpeace shills standing nearby, clipboards in hand, jealous. I hope so. And I hope that Frank Capra, wherever he is, might have seen us, and is pardoning some of the karmic debt I owe that bookstore.